AS IF / AS NOT

This is part of an ongoing series on Pistis, Elpis and Agape — faith, hope and love — as embodied political practices…

Elpis was the most noble of the three pine trees I named in Sparkhill Park. Its sure silvery trunk moved with certitude upward to sky and stars. Its boughs were orderly and artful. A beautiful creature. It might have appeared in some archetypal dream. A little too good for the real world: as if it belonged to some other time; some epoch of wholeness.

In We Are Nature Defending Itself, Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan recount their years spent resisting the construction of an airport in a rural area near Nantes, France. They did so by living there, forming a Commons on the land with locals and others drawn to the cause. An “outlaw zone,” the French government called it. In this rather hopeless looking battle against the state, they lived by Angela Davis’ words: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” They called it “that magical formula”: to act as if.

When is it unreasonable to act as if? Can a handful of people hope to stand in the way of the state? We are told every day where the power lies. Hope is always, to some degree, foolish. In a sense, the more foolish it is, the greater the hope. People came and put their bodies on the land, built themselves simple and sustainable homes on this soil long marked for death by tarmac (something like the prophet Jeremiah who bought a field during the years of the Babylonian invasion). They lived as pisteunti, keeping faith with the soil and with one another. They kept the watch of Elpis via the magic formula: to act as if the impossible might yet be.

The First Century Messianics kept the same formula, only they called it by its corresponding negative: to live as not. To act as if this were a time of wholeness, one must live as not according the present age of violence. Those early Messianics observed the formula of Angela Davies, because they believed “the present order of the world was passing away.” Whoever you are in the present world; and wherever you find yourself in the present order of things, it would be better, they said, to “live as not” (hos me), since that present time is gathering itself up to its end.

Paul gave this enigmatic advice to everybody, whatever their circumstances: to live as if everything were about to change. Or even, as if everything were already changed; even if not everything knew it yet. Does Caesar rule? Live as not. Is the world mal-handled by tyrants? Live as not. All things are yours, he would madly say.

In attuning to the magic formula, Paul was playing on a formula handed down by the messiah figure.

Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh…

And the reverse,

Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

And so correspondingly, Paul advises “those who mourn” to live “as not mourning, and those who rejoice as not rejoicing.”

Paulos is not a theologian in a room of books. He is an organiser, a ringleader of an underground network. He plays with the messianic saying to activate it. He plays with time itself, because he sees that time has already been played with. The Messianic saying puts the hearer — whoever they may be — in the place of anticipation: “...you will laugh.”. But for Paul, the switch is now mysteriously flipped: an insurgent time now runs concurrent with Caesar’s imperial clock, and so now is the time to live as not under Caesar… now is the time to act as if the Future Commons were really at hand. The messianic saying becomes an organisational principle.

All this is, perhaps, not so simple. My place in the present order of things is layered and tangled. Living as not is a call that asks a thousand questions about my place in the world. It doesn’t neatly answer them. “The one who is married should live as not!” says Paul. What does that look like? What does that even mean? And how can one tell the suffering person to live as not? Paul, I think, sees this, and tempers the enigma with messianic savvy: “Each should remain as they are,” he says, “but as though they were not!” The formula may generate piercing questions to the individual, but the embodied performance of response will never be formulaic. Correspondingly, to act as if calls for a kind of unmoored creativity and a high tolerance for brave experimentation.

Elpis is a kind of necessary madness; holy foolishness. It is the watch that jolts a person out of domesticated compliance. It is a willingness to believe in miracle and magic. It is a door ajar to the eucatastrophe in a world obsessed with locks and keys. When I watch — when I give my attention — I see things too beautiful to be real all the time. All things are possible.

To continue the story of Fremeaux and Jordan:

“On January 17, 2018, Macron’s Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, flanked by the Minister of Interior and the Minister of Ecology, announced on live TV that the airport would never be built… but in the same breath, he added that the “outlaw zone” must come to an end…”

The door of Elpis is ajar for the community of good faith, who live as not under the powers of the present age… who act as if all things were possible. In come miracles and crucifixions also.